Secondary 2nd Cycle

Bent Box is the first collection of poetry by Lee Maracle. The poems speak volumes of emotion ranging from quiet desperation to bitter anger to the depths of love. Maracle adds a rich blend of prose and poetry to her impressive list of fiction and autobiographical titles which include Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel, I Am Woman, Ravensong, Sundogs and her latest novel, Will's Garden.

DraMetis is the first anthology to focus on the emerging discipline of Metis drama. The pieces have all been previously produced and highlight the diversity of Metis drama being written and performed in Canada.

Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing tells another story of the mythical Wasaychigan Hill Indian Reserve, also the setting for Tomson Highway's award winning play The Rez Sisters. Wherein The Rez Sisters the focus was on seven "Wasy" women and the game of bingo, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing features seven "Wasy" men and the game of hockey. It is a fast-paced story of tragedy, comedy, and hope.

Based on a deposition signed by 14 Chiefs of the Thompson River basin on the occasion of a visit to their lands by Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1910, Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout is a ritualized retelling of how the Native Peoples of British Columbia lost their fishing, hunting and grazing rights, their lands, and finally their language without their agreement or consent, and without any treaties ever having been signed. It is one of the most compellingly tragic cases of cultural genocide to emerge from the history of colonialism, enacted by four women whose stories follow each other like the cyclical seasons they represent.

Written in the spirit of Shuswap, a â€œTrickster languageâ€ within which the hysterically comic spills over into the unutterably tragic and back, this play is haunted by the blood of the dead spreading over the landscape like a red mist of mourning.

Winner of the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best New Play and nominated for a Governor General's Literary Award when first published in 1988, The Rez Sisters has gone on to become an internationally critically acclaimed play, included in all major anthologies of Canadian literature world-wide. Now, in celebration of its twentieth anniversary, the play is being published in its original language: Cree. Included is a "Note on Dialect" by the author. The play tells the story of seven reserve women who decide to go to the "Biggest Bingo in the World," in Toronto, a night's drive from their Manitoulin Island home.
Of the many works that Tomson Highway has written to date, his best known are the plays The Rez Sisters, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Rose, and Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout. He is also the author of the best-selling novel The Fur Queen. For many years, he ran Canada's premiere Native Theatre Company, Native Earth Performing Arts, in Toronto, out of which has emerged a generation of professional Native Theatre artists. He divides his time equally between a cottage on northern Ontario and an apartment in the south of France.

Gaylord Powless was playing lacrosse by the age of three. He descended from generations of Mohawk lacrosse players and possessed great skill, but his native ancestry made him the target of brutal checking, and slashing. This is a compelling story of how this champion learned to deal with emotions.

INDISPENSIBLE FOR UNDERSTANDING THE BOREAL CULTURE of the North, Legends of the Forest is a collection of foundation stories and other legends as passed down through generations by the Sandy Lake Cree. Foundation stories describe events that "occur in the pale before human beings were extant on earth. Only Weesakayjac and the creatures inhabit the forest world." The enigmatic Weesakayjac is a hunter, in human form. "... One can hardly find a better teacher on the wild behaviour of human beings."

These stories are told by Chief Thomas Fiddler with help from his friends—Edward Rae, Titus Goodman, Thomas Linklater and Abel Fiddler. Together with Sacred Legends and Killing the Shamen this volume forms a trilogy of Sandy Lake stories from Penumbra Press.

When January Fournier arrives at the Foothills Hospital in Calgary, her brother Grey is barely clinging to life in intensive care after a horrible motorcycle crash. She''s devastated--but things get worse when the police accuse Grey of a string of bike thefts, claims he''s in no condition to dispute.

Jan decides she''s the only person who can uncover the truth and sets out to find the real thief. Soon, however, she finds her efforts blocked by a police officer who''s determined to see Grey convicted. In pursuit of the truth Jan has to pilot her own bike through the twisting switchbacks of Kananaskis County, with both her fate and that of her brother hanging on the edge of disaster.

Paasteewitoon Kaapooskaysing Tageespichit (Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing) tells another story of the mythical Wasaychigan Hill Indian Reserve, also the setting for Tomson Highway's award winning play The Rez Sisters. In The Rez Sisters the focus was on seven "Wasy" women and the game of bingo, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing features seven "Wasy" men and the game of hockey. It is a fast-paced story of tragedy, comedy, and hope.

Someday is a powerful new play by award-winning playwright Drew Hayden Taylor. The story in Someday, though told through fictional characters and full of Taylor''s distinctive wit and humour, is based on the real-life tragedies suffered by many Native Canadian families.

Anne Wabung's daughter was taken away by children's aid workers when the girl was only a toddler. It is Christmastime 35 years later, and Anne''s yearning to see her now-grown daughter is stronger than ever.

When the family is finally reunited, however, the dreams of neither women are fulfilled.

The setting for the play is a fictional Ojibway community, but could be any reserve in Canada, where thousands of Native children were removed from their families in what is known among Native people as the "scoop-up" of the 1950s and 1960s. Someday is an entertaining, humourous, and spirited play that packs an intense emotional wallop.

This award-winning play by Native playwright Tomson Highway is a powerful and moving portrayal of seven women from a reserve attempting to beat the odds by winning at bingo. And not just any bingo. It is THE BIGGEST BINGO IN THE WORLD and a chance to win a way out of a tortured life.

The Rez Sisters is hilarious, shocking, mystical and powerful, and clearly establishes the creative voice of Aboriginal theatre and writing in Canada today.